[-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 77, Issue 11

[John Craig Freeman]

Hi Alan, Thanks for the reply.  I hope you don't mind if I examine some of your underlying assumption as a point for further discussion.

Although I hear what you are saying about access, call it the augmentation divide, i'm not sure how much weight we should give it as we work toward creating viable practices using augmented or any other technology. If there is anything to learn from the events in North Africa in the past few months, is that the anxiety over the digital divide in the 1990s was probably over stated. It is also probably worth noting that the "Twitter Revolutions" of 2011 were modeled after avant-garde art and pop culture practices of the early 2000s, such as flash mobs. Further, the literacy divide still has significantly more impact and is much more problematic than the augmentation divide, but it does not stop us from writing books.

I don't think that we need to worry much about the ephemerality of art either. Chris Burden does not have to keep shooting himself for Shoot to play a significant role in art history. In 1989 during the uprising in Tiananmen Square the art students of the
Central Academy of Fine Arts erected a 10 meter tall Goddess of Democracy statue with the explicit objective of challenging the government to tear it down, which of course they did. When the artists collective 4Gentlemen put augmented replicas of the Goddess of Democracy in Tiananmen Square and Tank Man on Chang'an Avenue earlier this year, they did so with the understanding that unlike the world wide web and other Internet media, augmented reality is not yet censorable. Yet! http://fourgentlemen.blogspot.com/2011/01/tiananmen-square-augmented-reality.html. 

We should also acknowledge the the role conceptual art plays in the trajectory of augmented reality. Right now, 4Gentlemen are recommending against trying to view the work on location in the current political climate. So does the fact that the augments are there matter, even if no one can look at them? Time will tell if this project can outlast the government crackdown on free speech. Perhaps we can count on the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art to learn how to preserve early augmented reality art.

Although the virtual public sphere is indeed inextricably linked to the specifics of location, it is also inextricably networked into mass media culture, making intervention an infiltration into the national political discourse a very real possibility. One project that Mark Skwarek and I are working on is the Border Memorial: Frontera de los Muertos. It is an augmented reality public art project and memorial, dedicated to the thousands of migrant workers who have died along the U.S./Mexico border in recent years trying to cross the desert southwest in search of work and a better life. http://bordermemorial.wordpress.com/border-memorial-frontera-de-los-muertos/. 

Although thousands have died since security was ramped up in the border cities during the 1990’s, this issue has yet to even surface in the public consciousness. Everyone has an opinion about immigration, but few are even aware of, or simply choose not to acknowledge this loss. We assume that people will go out and experience the work first hand, however, the project should produce its true impact as it reverberates across the national media. Given the hyperbole and vitriolic punditry surrounding the politics of border security and immigration, it should not take to long for this project intervene in the public discourse. So the virtual public sphere is simultaneously of a specific place and distributed.

One way to think about the role of the networked monument in shaping national identity is to consider how electracy is changing identity formation in individuals. In the era of dynastic imperialism it was a fundamental requisite for the crown to maintain the concept, in the mind of its subjects, that class and cast are fixed, you are born into it. It cannot be changed. Monuments of the time served to reinforce this distinction in social roles. In order for industrial capitalism to work, there has to be a perception, real or imagined, of upward mobility in the minds of the population, but not too much. The bronze statue of the king in the plaza is replaced by giant presidents heads carved in stone on the mountainside, still looming over the people, but anyone can become president, right? 

I hope Greg Ulmer will jump in here and write about his idea for the Florida Rushmore, an idea which is very much possible now, 15 years after it was originally conceived, using AR technology. In the twenty-first century, not only is identity not fixed or inherited, it is absolutely malleable, subject to continuous invention and re-invention. It is, in short, avataric. Male/female, rich/poor, singular/multiple famous/anonymous, anything goes. In Florida Rushmore, Ulmer imagines tourist flocking to a giant sinkhole in the woods outside of Gainesville Florida, where they could view a giant holographic projection of the face of their own superego. The four heads of dead presidents are replaced by a composite image of the most influential people from each of four registers from the viewers identity formation experience, Family, Community, Entertainment and Expertise. In my case these four formative people include my mother, Esther the Anazasi mummy from the Cliff Palace interpretive center at Mesa Verde in the 1960s, Jim Morrison and Martha Rosler. http://institute.emerson.edu/vma/faculty/john_craig_freeman/Invent-L/Cover/Mystory.jpg. Using technology pioneered by Nancy Burson http://www.nancyburson.com/pages/publicart_pages/hrmachine.html, the Florida Rushmore project would scrape the internet for images and morph them  into a single giant head in realtime and display it for 15 minutes of fame.

Finally, the idea that physical monuments are unsullied by specific regimes of capital and control is a bit of a constructed illusion. Dollywood is just outside the park boundaries from the Great Smokey Mountains.







On Apr 16, 2011, at Sat, Apr 16, 10:00 PM, <empyre-request at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au> wrote:

> Today's Topics:
> 
>   1. Augmented reality as public art, mobile location based
>      monuments and virtual memorials (Alan Sondheim)
> 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> Hi - I'm not sure how to reply to this; I've been thinking about it. One 
> thing about locative art is its oddly inert quality - it's _there_ and 
> remains there, is fixed there. It's _there_ in the sense of geographic 
> location, and _there_ in the sense of specific technology needed to reveal 
> it, almost as if it's embedded in the technology, welded to it. The 
> ephemerality lies in the fact that it takes a specific, soon-to-be- 
> outdated technology to run, as well as energy; unlike a physical public 
> monument, the energy is meted out within a specific regime of capital and 
> control. So the 'We' in electracy you talk about is inextricably mixed 
> with capital, with enclaving, and with the specifics of location; only the 
> last is accessible to everyone. In this sense, what you call 'this virtual 
> public sphere' is a 'real private sphere' whose manifestation or represen- 
> tation is is virtual.
> - Alan


John Craig Freeman
Associate Professor of New Media

Emerson College
Department of Visual and Media Arts
120 Boylston Street
Boston, MA 02116-4624
(617) 824-8862
john_craig_freeman at emerson.edu
http://JohnCraigFreeman.net